Monday, November 01, 2010

The anthem of ATLAS collisions

Your humble correspondent is proud to have been the community organizer who has convinced the Canadian musician Don Garbutt to compose the candidate anthem of the ATLAS collisions. It wasn't so hard to convince him. ;-)

However, if your music taste is as conservative as mine, you should listen to the clip about 10 times before you decide whether you love it or not. :-)

Yes, variations on the French and Swiss anthems appear in the composition, near the French-Swiss border. If you don't understand the words, the video says:

The ATLAS experiment, studying the LHC collisions at seven teraelectronvolts.

The [?] of the Standard Model for gauge fields, gluon fields [?], the Higgs, Yukawa couplings.

The music features tracks individually imaged in "3-D Sound", using hrtf signal processing algorithms to simulate a "virtual surround" effect. Mr Garbutt had to dig up his old "Higgs Field" Logic session, to remix it minus the vocalizations. The 3-D is most evident in headphones. Maybe someday these animations will be output in 3-D, and then we will really be rocking!

I am not sure what happened with the contest trying to find the right sound for the LHC collisions that ATLAS organized some months ago. But if Don Garbutt could have been beaten by someone else, I would indeed love to hear the winner.

What I watched as a kid

When it comes to modern, classically sounding music that will always be connected with science in my ears, I can't fail to mention Vangelis' "To the Unknown Man" which was the theme music of "Wide Open the Windows of the Universe" (Okna vesmíru dokořán), a 1981 Czechoslovak popular program on astronomy and astrophysics that featured (and made famous) top Czech astrophysicist Dr Jiří Grygar who was also the main person behind the technical content.

The script for the program - about celestial bodies, cosmology, but also relativity in general etc. - was written by Dr Vladimír Železný, the founder and long-serving director of TV NOVA, the commercially most successful private TV station in the post-socialist Europe. As Dr Jiří Grygar told me three weeks ago, no person in the Czech TV industry has yet matched Železný's ability to become accurate about the science yet transform it into a mainstream piece of TV art.

The two Gentlemen ceased to be friends at some point because of some TV-related politics. It's sad, of course, because I have a respect for both of them.